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This weekend saw the finals of the Overwatch [official site] World Cup at Blizzcon. I told you about that one on Friday, if memory serves? Ah yes! Good good. It was essentially an exhibition match with a title at stake. I’ve been catching up with the action this morning over my porridge and I have to say, the final itself was pretty lopsided. I won’t put named team spoilers above the cut, but I will say it wasn’t a great match in terms of edge-of-seat excitement or anything. Anyhoodle: the main spoilery bit is next, after the jump!

Yeah, so South Korea beat Russia in straight… sets? Maps? Games? Games. That team has had a strong run through the competition anyway, not losing a single match in the whole of the knockout stages and the group stage, but the finals saw them dropping not a single map against their Russian opponents. While enjoying said porridge, I did see the Russian side make some good individual plays, but overall they just weren’t able to knock the South Koreans off the objectives or delay them long enough to successfully defend points. Here are the matches if you do fancy seeing what happened – if you’re a Winston player it’s also worth it for the the clinic South Korea’s Gong ‘Miro’ Jin Hyuk is putting on with that character.

I’m not sure whether something has changed about the spectator side of Overwatch as an esport or whether I just got my eye in after a while, but I did find these matches easier to parse. Not easy, but easier.

4-5 different attack/ability types per character going off in a (coordinated) mess certainly does not help. Maybe the show could do “analysis” between fights? as there tends to be a 15 second clean-up phase between fights.

I was rooting for Russia, but was expecting the outcome. They had too strong emphasis on genji+ana combo. And the fact that Shadowburn did swift strike into air before ulting served as big warning that koreans, acting like a well oiled machine, could easily read.
And Sweden-Finland match was way more interesting to watch.